The personal blog of Reyn Bowman, a Durham NC resident, 40-year veteran of community-destination marketing and still an explorer in community sense-of-place. Opinions expressed here are those of the author.

Thursday, March 05, 2009

And The Location is?????

This is a posting out of a PR office in Michigan for an event being held in Durham, NC. You don’t have to be involved in destination marketing and community branding to see how confusing this would be to attendees as well as unfair to the host community.

Durham is never mentioned as the location, here or in any description in the release.

RTP (misidentified as RTC) is a business park based in Durham but that is never mentioned, nor of course, would RTP show up as a city on navigational aids as a community because that part of Durham only has post office boxes.

Raleigh/Durham is, as the editor who shared this with me described, a non-existent place and only the name of the airport. But as you drive out of the airport, the arrows for Durham and Raleigh point in opposite directions.

My guess is someone is either very geographically challenged or was given the misimpression that Raleigh/Durham is a general area. And that giving a general area the size of a state or two, would be better than just giving the name of the community where the event is being held…Durham NC.

People traveling to an event…even if from only 25 miles away, want the specific location…the name of the place, the city, the county, the physical location.